iWant one - right now

ROB MORSE, EXAMINER COLUMNIST

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, August 9, 1998

I SCREAM, you scream, we all scream for iMac.

This machine is, to put it technically, really cool. Take it from a guy who doesn't know VRAM from CD-ROMs, only recently thought a search engine was something used by the Coast Guard, and uses his 11-year-old Mac SE as a typewriter.

The other day I went down to Apple headquarters in Cupertino to test drive the company's new iMac, "the Internet-age computer for the rest of us."

Steve Jobs' new feature-loaded $1,299 baby has been in development for 11 very intense months, and it just may be the computer which puts the shine back on the Apple image.

There are a lot of us who pretend to loathe computers, but secretly want to get on the Internet and find cool Web sites with recipes or Monica Lewinsky jokes. We're just afraid of seeming stupid, or filling our brains with gibberish like "233-MHz PowerPC G3 processor with 512k backside cache."

Tom Boger, the iMac product line manager, wrote some words I did understand on a blackboard: "speed," "style" and "simplicity." Then he left me alone in a room with a boxed iMac.

Sure enough, there was some stuff about MHz and and RISC printed on top of the box, but once you open the box, it's a whole other world of computers.

Ah. Even if you slave at a computer terminal at work, and hate the sight of the thing, you chuckle at the sight of this one.

It's like the first time you saw R2D2 in "Star Wars." The iMac looks like a Gummicomputer, made of semitransparent blue-green and ice-white plastic formed into a pod that looks like a toy air-car for one of the junior Jetsons.

The polycarbonate plastic is supposedly the same material that goes into bullet-proof glass, but even Elvis at his lowest point wouldn't have the heart to shoot this creature.

As huggable as it is (although not disgustingly huggable like a Teletubby), it's an elegant and powerful delivery system to launch people straight into the Internet. That's what the "i" in iMac stands for - Internet" - not

"I want one."

Bottom line: It took me an hour to get from opening the box to surfing the Net and finding my own Web site, but half of that time was spent waiting for Boger to come back and help me with the Apple password to use their account.

If I'd started my own account with Ethernet, I'd have been surfing Matt Drudge's and Linda Tripp's Web sites in a half hour, which sure beats the infinity it takes me to reset the clock on my VCR.

So what if I wasn't anywhere near as fast as the elementary school kid in an Apple ad who goes from box to Web in nine minutes flat.

Besides, I was entranced by the little instructional movie, with a Princess Leia-like woman in dreamy motion explaining very simply how to use the Web and e-mail features of the machine.

There are a lot of other features to the iMac, besides the fact that it turns techno-hodads into Net-surfers in a matter of minutes.

Boger ran through all the goodies that come with the machine. First of all, it's built around a 15-inch color monitor with such clarity that you wish iMAC picked up 49er games - one of the few things it doesn't do.

The machine is fast, as fast as home or school users need, and there are stereo speakers, surround-sound, double headset jacks so two kids can use them, and a very thin, very comfortable keyboard.

There is built-in writing, art and spreadsheet software, a Williams-Sonoma cooking CD-ROM with recipes and little movies showing basic cooking techniques, and beautiful high-definition 3-D video games. One involves dinosaurs running around more realistically than their counterparts in "Jurassic Park," except that the hero dinosaur uses a laser blaster.

Look, I may not know a Nanosaur from Quicken, but there's a lot of stuff here. If iMac were a car, it would be described as loaded.

The only thing it lacks is a floppy disc drive, but according to Boger it's old technology, so they left it out. You can add memory all kinds of other ways.

You may notice the lack of technical lingo in this column, but there's something about iMac that liberates you from the feeling that you have to even try to use it. There's something almost human about iMac. At the very least, you don't feel dehumanized sitting in front of it.

"It's like the VW bug," said Boger. "When people see it, they smile and say, "Hey, it's iMac.' "

Boger was clearly tired after 11 months of late night teamwork creating iMac. It's hard work thinking different, as Apple puts it, but this may be Apple at its different best.

"This is fresh and interesting," said Boger. "The computer business was getting boring."

Obviously, I'm not qualified to say if iMac is technically interesting, but if it ever becomes as obsolete as my old Mac SE, at least it will look great sitting in the corner on a desk.

"There are already art museums that want it for their collections, and it hasn't even been released yet," said Boger.

There was only one down side to iMac that I could clearly identify. I don't have one. I would have been willing to write out a check for $1,299 plus tax right there at Apple headquarters, but I'll have to get on a waiting list like everyone else.

But when I get mine, I may be able to go from box to Web in nine minutes flat.&lt;